Parenting in an Age of Bad Samaritans

A mother lets her daughter play in the park unaccompanied. A mother leaves her son in the car for a few moments, while she runs into a store to buy headphones. Many parents would consider these actions to be unwise—but are they criminal? According to three recent stories in the news, yes.

In the first case, Debra Harrell, a resident of North Augusta, South Carolina, allowed her daughter to play at the park while she worked at a local McDonald’s. She gave her daughter a cell phone. Lenore Skenazy noted in Reason that the park is “so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking … there were swings, a ‘splash pad,’ and shade.” But on her second day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. When the little girl said she was working, the adult called the cops, who declared the girl “abandoned,” and arrested Harrell.

The second story was shared by Kim Brooks in Salon back in June: her four-year-old son insisted on accompanying her to the grocery store for a quick errand, but then refused to go inside the store. After noting that it was a “mild, overcast, 50-degree day,” and that there were several cars nearby, Brooks agreed and quickly ran into the store. Unbeknownst to her, an adult nearby saw her leave her son, and proceeded to record the whole incident on his phone, watched Brooks return and drive away, and then called the police. The police issued a warrant for her arrest.

These are only a few recent stories in which parents have faced arrest after leaving their children unsupervised. As Radley Balko notes at the Washington Post, these incidents seem to signal the “increasing criminalization of just about everything and the use of the criminal justice system to address problems that were once (and better) handled by families, friends, communities and other institutions.”

This latter point hearkens back to Robert Nisbet’s excellent book The Quest for Community: Nisbet predicted that, in a society without strong private associations, the State would take their place—assuming the role of the church, the schoolroom, and the family, asserting a “primacy of claim” upon our children. “It is hard to overlook the fact,” he wrote, “that the State and politics have become suffused by qualities formerly inherent only in the family or the church.” In this world, the term “nanny state” takes on a very literal meaning.

Balko’s article provides an example of a recent arrest in which the parent doesn’t appear to have done anything particularly wrong:

What started out as a normal Sunday morning for Jeffrey Williamson of Blanchester, Ohio, turned into a nightmare when police officers showed up to his front door and arrested him in front of his family. His crime? Child endangerment—as the authorities described it—because his son skipped church to go play with friends. He now faces up to six months in jail.

According to Williamson, the local Woodville Baptist Church sends a van to his neighborhood twice a week to offer free transportation to those interested in attending services. Williamson’s children ride the van regularly on Wednesdays and Sundays. This morning was no different, as his eight-year-old son Justin and siblings said goodbye to their father and left their house to board the van.

One problem: Justin skipped church and went to play instead.

The young boy stayed in the neighborhood to play with friends and then later ended up at the local Family Dollar store down the road. After police officers were called to the store by a customer who recognized Justin, they took him back to his neighborhood where they proceeded to arrest his father for child endangerment.

The father could not have foreseen or altered the sequence of events. Skipping church doesn’t appear to be something his children normally did, nor did he abandon his child in any way. His arrest appears to be a clear overreaction on the part of the police. It can be argued that the mother who left her daughter to play unsupervised in the park, as well as the Salon writer who left her child alone in the car, both made foolish decisions. But is it the government’s job to police our social decisions?

There’s also the question of the three “good samaritans” in these situations—the people who noticed a child unaccompanied, without a parent, and decided to call the police. In the first instance, perhaps, calling the police made sense: the girl was a complete stranger, by herself at the park. In Brooks’ case, however, a person recorded the whole incident and watched Brooks get into her car before calling the police. They could easily have talked to her, reprimanded her, warned her that they could report such activity. Williamson’s child was seen in the dollar store by a customer who recognized him—thus implying that the person had at least some knowledge of the child’s family. Why didn’t they talk to Justin, or call Justin’s parents?

In each case, the citizen jumped first to the State to care for the situation, rather than exercising any sort of personal involvement. This hardly seems to fit the definition “good samaritan”—these actions reveal a more passive, isolated attitude. But here, again, we see the result of breakdown in modern American community—without a sense of communal closeness or responsibility, we act as bystanders rather than as stewards. As Brooks puts it in her article,

We’re told to warn our children not to talk to strangers. We walk them to school and hover over them as they play and some of us even put GPS systems on them, confident, I guess, that should they get lost, no one will help them. Gone are the days of letting kids roam the neighborhood, assuming that at least one responsible adult will be nearby to keep an eye out. I’m told there are still things like carpools and babysitting co-ops, but I’ve never found one. In place of “It takes a village,” our parenting mantra seems to be “every man for himself.”

This is the unfortunate result of living in a world where parenting is no longer supported and bolstered by private association and community. If only there had been a family member, friend, or church member who had volunteered to watch Harrell’s little girl. If only the “good samaritan” at the dollar store had considered calling Justin’s father, or offered to take the boys home. We live in a society that neglects the sort of private stewardship that could foster truly safe environments for our children—and unfortunately, when parents are thrown into prison, it hardly seems to create more safe surroundings for these kids.

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37 Responses to Parenting in an Age of Bad Samaritans

Perhaps this is the result of our social media driven world where we no longer know how to have authentic relationships with neighbors. It becomes so much easier to call in a third party to arbitrate a situation that would normally have been handled between individuals only a generation ago. Of course, the third party in question is driven by statistics – calls for service, reports, and arrests. Not a good solution.

According to a website that advocates returning to sensibility in raising kids, the risk really isn’t that great, despite what the media says. (they have to sell ads somehow, and fear works well.) http://www.freerangekids.com/crime-statistics/

As I keep telling everyone, all of these people are members of Generation X, my own generation, the generation that has taken stewardship of the country but refuses to admit it. So much easier to blame every problem on Baby Boomers and Millenials.

I remember when I first took notice of this growing prctice of calling in the state. Ten years ago when police arrested a Swiss or Dutch couple for leaving their child outside of MacDonalds. something quite common in their country or community of origin. We are so afraid of each other or so willing to engage our fantasies of hero by proxy, that we have turned off our self.

The self that has succumbed to the drone of media hyped reality that on the rare instances of child kidnapping, mayhem and murder are apervasive reality when in fact they represent a small segment of criminal activity.

The growth of the state as parent went into full swing in the early 1970’s. And given the level of fear mongering incidents, from 9/11 to every act of terrorism, financial collapse, random acts of public multiple murder, entire networks that run nothing but humans beings engaged in exacting some pretty nasty acts of mayhem on their fellow citizens (I was a a huge connoisseur of such programs – until I began to question it’s impact on my already hyped suspecious nature due to events in my own local — that I have quit cold turkey, in which a fall off the wagon is a program or two as opposed to a feast.) There is is so much noise warning us that our world is near collapse and liberals have convinced many that government is the only solution. It is unclear why we buy such notions as government is often the cause for exacerbating the same.

i have spent the past eight years camped out in my living room because it took me man years to be convinced that ne’er do wells have actually been invasing my residence. We have found pokers in which indicated that they chased cats under the bed. Which despite have an alarm system is the least of the crazy and dark activities these visitors have engaged in what is a nerve racking existence. I prefer to engage my community as myself, even if my engagement is unorthodox. The large truth is that millions and millions of citizens engage each other everyday with few consequences of human destruction. We wave hello, thanks or give the proverbials appropriate hand signals without such engagements ending in gunfire or fist fights.

Perhaps we would do well to remember that we are the government and before engaging the police or the state in any manner we take some responsibility take some risks and ask the harangued mother, or father if the need a hand. Because as exemplified in all of the incidents above if they are as written, the judgement of the state seems a bit aksew.

And with that said, I want to believe that even that ‘the bad samaritan’ is as rare, if not more, than parents intending ill harm deliberate or otherwise on their children. I am bolstered by the fact that last week while waiting for my car service, a gentleman asked if I needed a hand pushing my vehicle. Amongst a throng of people, that genle alone, perhaps, bravely risked engaging me And while I declined the offer, being manly and all, I was encouraged that he did so. None of te officers inquired if I needed assistance, but they were all to happy to tell me to move along, ignoring that I had been standing in the blistering heat behind my car for the better part of thirty minutes.

The alarmist reaction to the supposed horror of rapcious threats children face day in and day out (according to the media) is echoed here in the alarmist reaction to a select few anecdotes of over-reaction… and suddenly the entire country is a nanny-state, shirking all individual responsibility.

As idiotic and over-reactive as those situations are, and I agree that the media creates a constant state of fear and anxiety driving rifts in community… you have to admit that trying to justify your own demonization and overreaction (OMG! The nanny state!) by pointing out another one (OMG! Unaccompanied child! Call the cops!) seems hypocritical at best.

Don’t forget, there are private-prisons-for-rofit and a legal system assembly line that needs to keep being supplied. Fascism in every time and place has its own unique cultural imprint. 4% of the world’s population with 25% of its prison population, makes an “exceptional” mockery of American constitutional government,

This is a great article, but let’s be clear: there have been a couple of notable national cases of people running to the police over other people’s parenting situations. As usual, we’re not hearing about the 99.9% of cases where the Samaritan *did* ask the child if their parents were nearby, or *did* call the father of the child they recognized.

How about, instead of good or bad Samaritans, we had people who minded their own business?

The man in the original Good Samaritan was robbed, stripped, beaten and left lying half dead in a ditch on the side of the road. So, to anyone who came along, there was probably little to no ambiguity in the situation. The man was clearly in need of help.

But in these examples, and others like them (like the mother who faces charges because she let her ten year old ride public transportation alone), what we have are busybodies overreacting to situations that, to me, seem more or less innocent, and which are ambiguous at worst.

Thus, I wonder why the culprit is the usual suspect here, ie “modernism” in some form or another. Folks, apparently, are actually not “alienated” or “isolated” enough, at least not so much that they can keep their big noses, and their values, out of other people’s affairs. As none of the children in these examples were in fact in any danger, one wonders why the takeaway is that the interveners should have intervened in a different way, and not interrogation as to why they felt compelled to intervene at all. In these cases, the lesson, to me, is NOT “it takes a village,” but “live and let live.”

Perhaps media, or social media, is to blame. Still, I remember, back in the day, when pretty much any adult felt authorized to intervene directly with children, and I don’t think that was so great either. If it is not your kid, and the kid is not messing with your property or person, then it should be none of your darn business what he is doing. Nor should you be the arbiter of what age or maturity level is necessary for the unsupervised activity the child is engaged in. Kids should be able to play in a park or neighborhood or go to a store or ride a bus, without answering to anyone but their parents, and parents should be free to allow their kids to do so without answering to the authorities.

As the Samaritan, why should I care enough to spend my precious time and emotional capital on ‘getting involved’ beyond the bare minimum of calling the state to look after these kids? Isn’t that what the state is for? Why else do we pay taxes?

You want me to get involved on a personal level? Are you mad? Why on Earth would I do that? Unattended children are like garbage on the street. I pay public sanitation workers to pick up the refuse, I pay child services to do the same with children and their incompetent parents. They are nothing to me beyond an emotional nuisance and I care for them accordingly. In calling social services, I call the garbage man to take care of trash.

Remember, Margaret Thatcher said ‘society’ doesn’t exist. This view is a consequences of that ideology. If you want something different provide me with a reason to invest time, money (beyond what I pay in taxes) and emotional capital in ‘private and voluntary’ associations and relationships that would allow “community” to look after these children and ensure they are ok. As far as I’m concerned my time and emotional capital are far more valuable to me than the money I spend on the state to ensure your worthless children stay out of my way.

You can’t spend 60 years telling people that only the individual matters and put in place economic policies that destroy whole communities and strings of communal attachment and then wring your hands that people only do the bare minimum in cases like this. You’ve taught us to always look after number one — and this is the consequence.

Get your garbage children out of the way or I’ll call the garbage man. If you don’t like my view, give me an incentive to see your children as something other than bothersome trash.

“They could easily have talked to her, reprimanded her, warned her that they could report such activity. ”

Asking to get shot in some parts of the U.S.?

This reminds me of that guy who got shot and killed by the retired police sheriff in a movie theatre over cell phone use or some such.

Given the reality of this, with God knows who carrying a gun, perhaps its wisest to call the cops. Better the cop get shot (who is paid to be shot after all), than you. You just never know. 😉

And while that sounds completely stupid, I’m sure it’s a factor in some fraction of the instances that occur.

Rebuking a stranger on the street? Are you insane? You can literally get shot and killed in some U.S. states and the shooter has the law on their side in some cases. Especially if it’s a small white woman packing heat and a large black man doing the reprimanding for negligent child care. If you’re going to do anything in that case, call the cops. Or let the kid fend for itself. Get involved directly though? Yikes. That’s a mortal gamble in that situation.

Oh, the horror, to recall that as children we routinely left the house after breakfast, came home for lunch, and left again until dinnertime. Where did we go? Out. What did we do? Nothing.

Actually we wandered neighborhoods, organized our own games, built forts… but I could not resist referring to an truly wonderful book by Robert Paul Smith.

Our own children walked to school and/or to friend’s houses by themselves, and played outside while their mother was inside. Granted, they were not as far-ranging as we were, and lived in a fairly safe small city/town, but…

Child endangerment my ***. Calling the police is ridiculous, but how about the “justice” system running with that ball instead of dropping it? Fran Macadam as usual brings up a good point.

So what is a parent to do now who wants to cultivate a healthy sense of independence and confidence in his/her children by giving them the freedom to roam that we had in the 1970s? We now potentially face prison? And how are our children supposed to develop into mature, responsible citizens if we’re now supposed to bind their hands with the apron strings?

JMC: If you don’t like my view, give me an incentive to see your children as something other than bothersome trash.

Given your stated attitude, it seems very unlikely that anyone could possibly succeed with you.

Children learn by example. The prominent example in their lives is their parents (and older siblings). But unless they will live out their lives in total isolation, they will see as examples everyone else they encounter.

So, I ask you, with no hostility intended: If you cannot provide an example of ordinary human interaction, to engage and deal with children as an adult, then you cannot expect them to grow up and engage with you in similar circumstances. May the gods forbid you ever be in distress, and watch every passerby ignore you or look away.

That’s a negative incentive. I wish I could come up with a positive one.

It is strange that we’ve come to this. When I was 8 years old, back in the ’80s, I and all the other neighborhood kids were roaming the town on our own. You’d hop on your bike after school, ride to another kid’s house, and ring the doorbell unannounced to see if he could come out to play. Does this really not happen anymore?

Laughing. Most people who interact with their neighbors or their fellow strangers are not getting shot.

It is doubtless, that one is going to get shot while attempting to insure another child’s welfare.

The most likely response if negative is a ‘mind your own business.’

I think in the general the article has a point given the ability of most commentators to respond on point.

If you have ever experienced how intrusive the state can be and how even well meaning officers can turn nothing into something —
The level of social destruction by an unnecessary arrest doesn’t get much play, but when you are poor and you have to spend time in court proceedings, counseling sessions — the margin of cliff is a hair width.

I think JMC is being at least somewhat satirical, but what he says is emblematic of the attitude today. You can’t foster community when we take on the ‘we’re a nation of individuals’ and ‘society doesn’t exist’ too often associated with the right (but also done by the left).

Community seems to be more about exclusion than inclusion. It’s easy when your neighbor works at the same job you do, looks like you, goes to your church, and has a last name similar to yours. But the more different your neighbor is (and by extension his/her children) the more likely you are to just get government to remove the ‘nuisance’ as JMC put it.

Rod and others on TAC bemoan the loss of community, these ‘good samaritans’ being a symptom of it. Unfortunately, ‘community building’ in the past usually meant total cultural assimilation. Schmidts became Smiths. Lutherans became Baptists. Anyone who didn’t join was frozen out if they couldn’t be driven out. Why would their kids be treated differently?

The explanation for this bizarre behavior of the bad Samaritans in the story is quite simple: they were affirming their identities as “better parents”, “responsible citizens”, etc. The cost of ruining lives of others to affirm one’s identity is too high, you say? Well, ain’t that too bad…

So what is a parent to do now who wants to cultivate a healthy sense of independence and confidence in his/her children by giving them the freedom to roam that we had in the 1970s? We now potentially face prison? And how are our children supposed to develop into mature, responsible citizens if we’re now supposed to bind their hands with the apron strings?

Excellent questions, and ones I’ve been asking myself. I’d hate to have to move our family out to the sticks with no immediate neighbors for the kids to play with just to avoid this kind of sh*t. It seems like the upper class helicopter parents are forcing their neurotic child rearing practices onto the rest of us via the justice system, the schools, and the 24/7 media.

If I were a lawyer or a legislator, I’d be exploring a variety of avenues to legally empower parents (especially poor ones) with due process rights that would not simply leave them at the mercy of unaccountable, anonymous tipsters or law enforcement officers who don’t agree with some lifestyle choice/parenting decision, or just plain overreact. I would support a parents’ rights organization perhaps modeled after HSLDA, where any parent could pay an annual membership fee and have access to legal advice and possibly representation. Without the ability to effectively push back against “good” samaritans who are being unreasonable, its becoming too dangerous to try and raise children anymore in the USA.

It is a symptom of big government – the more power we give to goverent to decide for the individual, family, community, & other lower levels of society, more freedom we surrender to the state.

The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity should be the guiding principle in governance. Here the individual, family, & immediate community take responsibility to decide & act to resolve their problem before they ask the state for help.

It is a symptom of big government – the more power we give to goverent to decide for the individual, family, community, & other lower levels of society, more freedom we surrender to the state.

It is not a symptom of “big government.” At the very least, you have cause and effect confused. If the smaller community institutions, such as the extended family, immediate community, were healthy, no one would ask “big government” to intervene in such situations, even in a totalitarian state. Nor was it “big government” that weakened them, at least not by itself. It was economic mobility and economic development that has eroded the institutions of subsidiarity, often encouraged (but not always) by government. No one has to remain in the community they were born in, and economic opportunities are often greater elsewhere. Also, employers leave communities to find cheaper labor, and real estate developers make more money by turning working class communities into yuppievilles. A “community is not just the location of your house — it is the connections to other people in that neighborhood that makes a community. As for “big government,” while its authority is expanded by having to take on those tasks normally left to smaller social units, its existence is independent of that. “Big government” is a symptom of “big society.” The larger the population, the more government you have.

The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity should be the guiding principle in governance. Here the individual, family, & immediate community take responsibility to decide & act to resolve their problem before they ask the state for help.

If those intermediate institutions were healthy, and had some power, the individual would not need “big government” for minor problems. Problem is, they are not healthy or powerful, and are often non-existent. We often don’t even know our immediate neighbors. I’m not Catholic, and I don’t know when the concept of subsidiarity was first formulated, but I know that the Catholic Church spent most of its existence as an integral part of feudal society. Strong, stable communities were the rule then, not the exception.

Subsidiarity is the antithesis of socialism.

Disagree. Strong intermediate institutions could become the basis of socialism, insuring that basic goods and services are properly and evenly distributed. Your definition of socialism needs reworking.

Parents can be arrested for an innocent bruise on their kid’s arm after Child services coerces a parental abuse admission out of the child. This is the logical next step down the slippery slope (mixed metaphor, I know).

Thinking about the responses here, I find a number of points are worth making.

The first is that physical mobility erodes extended family, but also that big cities erode community. The problems as they are in small town America are different: people know eachother and watch out for eachother. I remember the day we got a concerned call from my father wondering why an ambulance was parked outside our house in Chelan (it was actually a plumber who was using a very old ambulance as a business vehicle).

These two things doom the US to be pathologically individualistic, seeing the state as the intermediary between people wherever safety is a concern, but especially where *poor people* (or people of color) are concerned. It isn’t that people don’t care. It is that the system is set up so that the care gets channeled into destructive ways.

WOW! I believe you, Gracy Olmstead, have hit on a hotbed topic. I can actually see both sides of the situation.

Am I sad that children cannot roam the neighborhood? Yes. But in the days when children were allowed to do this, Moms, in particular, were stay-at-home-moms. In today’s economy, that is a family perk that has gone away.

When apartment rentals start in the $1,000 range and dogs and kids are limited, we have to look at how people on minimum wage can exist at all. If you make $12,000/year and are working, you cannot afford a place to live, childcare, transportation, food, clothing, etc.

You have to have a credit check and a background check just to qualify for most places to live. People making minimum wage don’t usually have good credit…why? They don’t have enough money to go around — not because they are frivolous but because they simply cannot make enough money to live on.

The mother working at a fast food restaurant and sending her daughter to the park with a cell phone to call her if a problem arose was probably not her first choice. Was it a safe choice for her daughter? I would not have trusted that situation, but when you are faced with no other alternatives, you do what you have to do. Could she have kept her kid at the fast food restaurant? Maybe…but her employers may have told her that she couldn’t do it! Then what?

I’m afraid that I don’t agree that our children are like garbage and you call in the officials to clean it up! Children are human beings; we don’t even treat pets that harshly!

Is it fair to call in Child Protective Services in these cases? I realize that’s the protocol, but I also know these people are so bogged down with too many cases that the kid might have been safer at the playground unattended and surrounded by gobs of other kids and parents.

There are no cookie cutter answers to any of these problems. Why would a mother leave a child in the car, because she couldn’t get him to get out of the car? Have you ever dealt with a strong-willed child? Sometimes, you simply have to take the path of least resistance. Is it the best choice? Well, my mom left my sister and I in the car on many occasions that I remember. We were fine…I don’t have any residual issues. Was it safe? In terms of child kidnapping, I don’t think we were at risk. In terms of heat exhaustion, we definitely weren’t at risk. In terms of being abandoned, hardly! I’m not condoning leaving a child in the car, but I’m not sure what that mother’s choices were.

Bringing the police into the situation should not be a huge negative, but the police need to be educated to tell the difference from true abandonment and child endangerment and a frustrated parent who chose to do what needed to be done. As for the child who played hookie from church and ended up in a store…well, how could anyone blame the dad over a poor decision on his child’s behalf. Again, the police in these incidents needed to use better judgement.

Is our system broken? Probably, but until we can generate the creative power necessary to envision a new system, we’re stuck with this one.

Is our community different today than in the 1950s? Absolutely! Is it more dangerous? I’m not sure if it is truly more dangerous, but there are fewer stay-at-home parents…and that makes our neighborhoods less safe for kids! Used to, if a kid had a problem, they’d just go up to a neighbor’s house and that parent, usually a Mom, would take care of it…such as, a banged up knee or someone threatening a kid.

But gone are those days! We cannot simply go back to those days when Moms were primarily stay-at-home moms. Those that stay at home these days are usually work-from-home moms, which is totally different!

I believe that probably the police and child protective services should be involved. Arresting the parent? Well, I think all facts should be checked before you arrest a parent about a kid that is not in danger of being killed. The trouble is that it takes our system some time to figure it out.

Would that kid play hookie from church again? Probably not! That would be just as tramatic for the child as for the adult…somewhat of an example of logical consequences. I am one of those liberal parents, but I also highly believed in boundaries for my children. They didn’t always stay in those boundaries. I think parents make a better disciplinarian than the police; however, there are those instances where the police need to step in.

I had a child who always crossed the line. He did get into trouble as a young teen and has remained in and out of trouble all of his life. At some point, the parent cannot discipline a kid and keep them out of trouble. Sometimes, a jail experience straightens them out…sometimes, it doesn’t. Each kid, each parent, and each incident is usually so unique that you have to give it to a 3rd party, such as police/child protective services.

I stepped forward as a private citizen in recent years to alert parents to what I though was the cruel treatment of their child (aged 3) by a nanny that I witnessed. I did not know the parents personally; and didn’t even know were the child lived or who his parents were when I witnessed the “abuse”. Several weeks later, I saw the nanny enter a home in my neighborhood with the child.

After the nanny left, I walked to the boy’s home and told his mother what I saw the nanny do to the boy. The woman looked at me as if I was some kind of madman, told me she was perfectly happy with her nanny, and showed me the door.

I believe the mother didn’t want to know because acknowledgment would have required that she go through the exhausting process of vetting a new nanny. Better a “known” evil, in her mind.

Since that day, I have given up trying to involve myself with the “community”. I’ll be happy if I can maintain my own childcare standards with my young daughter until she reaches adulthood. I’m busy enough playing “secret secret service papa” to protect her from the raging selfishness of her peers in “community” spaces such as playgrounds as the offending child’s parent chats on the phone or looks on apathetically – if they are anywhere to be seen, that is.

If community every really existed in the U.S., it is now gone forever. There are simply too many different points of view. And there are no standards out there. It is a free-for-all.

I’m not going near someone’s child unless they approach me, and if they don’t have mom’s number then I’m calling the state while they stand at a distance and remaining silent. Under no circumstances am I having a conversation or allowing them into a car.

The problem is really that male child molesters can’t approach other people’s children. And by that I mean that if you are a man, society says that you must be a male child molester. That’s why there’s no men left in the teaching profession.

This isn’t a red vs blue thing, both sides have lost the plot and community will not reappear until sanity returns.

Since as many people on both sides of the aisle are equally likely to be reporting a kid alone in the car or park, it seems less a political problem of allowing the state too much power as it is a social problem. We all know the stories of how things used to be, usually in the context of over-protective parents denying their children the same freedoms today as they or maybe their parents enjoyed, even though the probability of something bad happening is still very low. The final argument parents use for denying their children freedom to be kids on their own is that, if something bad does happen, how are they going to explain it to others and to authorities. That final argument is basically unassailable without pointing out that their reasoning (motivation?) is based more on concern for themselves and how their actions are viewed, than concern about the safety of their children.
The horror of children being abducted, children being cooked in a car, or unattended children becoming victims of some accident, has led to some over reaction by the public and law enforcement with uncompromising laws intended to strongly deter parents from discarding or forgetting their responsibilities. Whatever political stand parents want to take, they all don’t want their children to become victims. Of course they probably don’t want to be victims of over-zealous citizens backed up by uncompromising law enforcement. So the actual problem occurring with low probability but horrible consequences has led to capricious results.
Rather than a political problem, it sounds more like a social problem stoked by real fears but even more by the obsession with gratuitous violence in popular entertainment. How many episodes of law and order are there anyway? Like, we have become our own victims in the pursuit of playing victims, perpetrators and enforcers on tv. I like to ask friends that enjoy stuff like criminal minds, who it is they identify with in those horrible attacks. The same with horror movies. Is you the victim or is you the murderer? No, you just like to watch? And that precisely defines the nature of the beast and his modus operandi. There seems little chance that there is a political solution to fear, especially when fear is used politically.

As a retired law enforcement official, I feel this article is so very timely and thought-provoking. Truly, people need to ask themselves why police need to be called for everything under the sun. Why do matters that are completely NON-criminal in nature get turned into legal nightmares for basically honest decent people? This article goes a long way, in my opinion, towards explaining this mess.

I blame over-zealous law enforcement personnel a great deal as well as the citizens who are not doing a good thing for kids or their parents. Police need to take a deep breath, muster up some good judgement, and “do the right thing.” Too many officers have become automatons who are eager to bolster their monthly stat’s and appear to be “doing something.” Law enforcement line supervisors and executives need to be paying a bit more attention to what their people on the street are actually doing.

Sadly, an increasing number of agencies need to be removing their “To Protect & Serve” decals from their cruisers. They have become “To Rule & Abuse” departments and this is terribly dangerous in a ‘free’ society. Some of the police actions these days are downright illegal, excessive, unconstitutional, or otherwise unwarranted over-reaches of the law and the authority conferred on police.

I keep reading “How are we supposed to raise independent adults out of coddled children?” and the cynic in me responds – “Why would the state desire independent thinkers when they can have citizens who are used to their every second being monitored and controlled?”